Portrait Gaming PC
2016-08-02 06:08The computer and entertainment industries have pretty well settled on 16:9 aspect ratio displays these days. Even my beloved 16:10 has gotten hard to find. Widescreen isn’t suited for everything, but what about when you turn them? I had a 32” Panasonic TV left over that came with my IIDX machine as well as some spare PC parts. With minimal investment I was able to cobble them together into a dedicated portrait (9:16) gaming PC!
The build:
- Leftover 32” Panasonic 720p TV
- Intel Core i3-3225, formerly the CPU in my streaming PC, formerly formerly the CPU in my router. I spent the extra $20 for it over the i3-3200 in 2012 because it included Intel HD 4000 graphics instead of HD 2500. A big improvement even though I didn’t use it at all at the time.
- 16GiB DDR3
- An 80GB OCZ (R.I.P.) SSD recycled from an older build.
- ASUS P8Z77-I DELUXE/WD motherboard, chosen for its integrated WiFi/BT.
- Dynatron T450 low profile cooler
- Antec ISK110 VESA PC case, designed to be mounted on the monitor.
- VIVO table-top TV stand
The TV stand still offers plenty of table clearance when mounting a 32” display vertically. It took me a while to realize I should be searching “TV stand” instead of “monitor stand” because I just consider it a monitor. The free Windows 10 offer was about to end, so I installed Windows 7 Pro with one of my old MSDNAA keys from college then did the upgrade to 10 Pro. Windows 10 has its issues, especially the telemetry tracking, but it’s worth it to stay on a supported OS. Windows 7 left mainstream support a year and a half ago and will be unsupported entirely in 2020. Classic Shell and DisableWinTracking make 10 pretty tolerable.
It lives! Luckily most of the games well-suited to a portrait display are vertical shooters and rhythm games, both genres that tend to be light on resources. Time to remember how bad I am at Ikaruga.